What is the greatest threat to your investments that you can do something about?
Nighttime news sensationalizes claims of impending economic recessions, trade-wars between economic powerhouses like the US, China, EU. Or failing crop yields this year, or oil pipeline issues, climate change. The impact of all of these sounds terrifying, and will certainly have economic consequences that ripple around the world. If these news anchors are to be believed, the days of doom and gloom are ahead. Religious fanatics also scream of the end of days, with judgement day fast approaching. But before we work ourselves into a panic, let’s look at what we can control in our personal economic lives.
I can’t tell you how to deal with any of the aforementioned scenarios. These issues, although very real, also have very uncertain economic consequences. Speculating about those impacts is a dangerous game, and ill-advised in any financial portfolio. And as such, personal finance advice remains the same, invest in a diversified portfolio, and avoid as many fees as possible. It is these fees that you can avoid; these fees that kill your investment returns.
What is the effect of fees on your investments? Let’s take a look.
For the purpose of these examples, let’s use “typical” investment fees to represent the offerings of most large financial institutions. These would be the big banks, pension companies, etc. Their fees, depending on the investment option you pick, are usually around the 2% mark, but can go much higher. Let’s see what those fees do to your investments. In the following vastly simplified example, we’ll start with a $ 100,000 investment and no further additions. This money will be held for 25 years, a good long-term investing strategy.
This simple example shows the growth a long-term investing strategy can have, more than doubling our money over that 25 year period. But there’s more to it than that. A low cost investing option, like those now offered by many e-banks, will knock those annual fees lower, and the impact is dramatic. Let’s take a look:
Here we can see the same investment, the same rate of return on the portfolio, and yet the annual management fee is 1.7% lower. The results? A whopping $142,187.07 over the course of 25-years. That means those fees that are charged by typical investments are stealing 33.25% of our overall returns!
This example, although overly simplified, shows the impact that fees can have on your investment portfolio. And that impact is huge. So large that you would be able to retire earlier on more money if you simply moved your portfolio to one of many low-cost investment funds.
So what’s the take-away here?
Fees are often displayed in complex ways on your statements, which makes it hard to determine how much you are actually being charged. But those fees do add up, so it is essential for reaching financial freedom that you look into all the fees that are out there, and minimize the cost of those fees. By doing this one easy step, you could end up with an extra 30% (or more) in your investments!
Action Item
Look into your investments, including (and especially) any work-provided retirement plan. What are the fees? If you aren’t paying less than 1%, you should look at similar portfolios in terms of risk tolerance from other institutions, as the fees alone could save you thousands.
Note: if you do have an employer created retirement account, often these funds are locked in while you are an employee. If the time comes where you are advancing your career elsewhere though, you should definitely look into transferring those investments into a low-cost provider to see significant savings on fees!